Treasure Hunting America - Episode 106

today on treasure hunting America will travel to the hills above Lake Havasu City Arizona to prospect for gold and meteorites with sue Sully when you dig up a nugget you're the first person to bring it out of the ground you're the first person to see it and touch it when you find something that's been lying there on the ground for 20,000 years and you're the first person to pick it up and you realize you're holding a piece of outer space that's just pretty cool we'll also visit with Gerry Markinson who huts for treasure along Lake Havasu for what the vacation crowd left behind Lake Havasu is a very popular area on weekends during the summer people come down in their boats and they tend to lose things all coming up on treasure hunting America [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of treasure hunting America I'm your host mark Hendricks for the next half hour we'll share some amazing stories of everyday treasure hunters across the country discovering vast antiquities and caches of yesteryear as an avid coin collector in her childhood the hobby of treasure hunting came easily to sue her residents in Lake Havasu Arizona provides many opportunities for gold prospecting and treasure hunting I got started metal detecting 25 years ago I was a coin collector my interest in coin collection came from my childhood my father's job took him all over the world and when we didn't have to be in school we got to go with him so we lived in a lot of different European countries and they had coins that had kings and queens and animals and flowers on him and I just thought that they were so interesting compared to the coins that we have in the US but then as an adult I took more of an interest in coin collecting for US coins when I got my first metal detector the very first thing I found was a 1919 wheat back penny and I found it in my backyard and I didn't have a clue what I was doing and I dug a hole that was about this big and this deep because the coin kept rolling from the side of the hole down to the bottom because I didn't know how to pinpoint but I was so excited at heart I'm a treasure hunter I think it goes beyond metal detecting before I bought my first detector I was digging in old dumps and screening things out of dumps and I'm always looking at the ground of picking things up and I'm always dragging things home some people don't think of looking for things I just I just like to find things pursue this passion for finding things of the past changed her perspective on a subject she didn't appreciate growing up history for me it comes from wanting to learn about what I found it's taught me a lot about history it's taught me to appreciate history and to want to learn about it when I was in kid I hated history that was the absolute worst class my attitude was who cares about memorizing all those names and places and dates of all those dead people what does that have to do with me but once I started finding things and wanting to know who owned this and how long has it been in the ground history became alive for me and I started really getting interested in it because you are digging pieces of history the hobby of metal detecting has been predominantly a male activity but that doesn't bother su she thrives on being in the outdoors with her friends there's a group of six of us and we go out together every chance we get we take two or three four-wheel drive vehicles and we'll go out and we'll spend the day and and we have a ball at it but this is predominantly a hobby for men I don't know why more women don't get involved in this I think a lot of it has to do with not wanting to get dirty it's the women that get involved in this or the type that are more outdoors related more sports-related more camping and hiking related than indoors I have quite a few meteorites that I found in gold Basin it's a fairly well known meteor right field that's a couple of hours drive from here so it's easy for me to get to it the gold Basin meteorite fell to earth 20,000 years ago and it's a piece of outer space and when you find something that's been lying there on the ground for 20,000 years and you're the first person to pick it up and you realize you're holding a piece of outer space that's just pretty cool when we return sue will take us out into the Arizona desert to find gold nuggets and share a special find relating to World War two and General Patton [Music] today we're hunting in a location that is just outside Lake Havasu City we're in an area that the locals called the Red Hills and in the history books it's called the Chimel wavy plasters gold has been found here for at least the last hundred and fifty years the soldiers from fort Mojave were here in 1842 digging gold they came in on burros during the Depression era the old-timers came here and mined for gold because they couldn't make a living doing anything else my focus for research has changed since I moved to Arizona Lake Havasu City was founded in 1964 so we don't have anything old here we don't have old buildings and old parks and schools and old picnic grounds or I can go and find old coins but we have gold and all around us we live in an area where you can go hunt for gold nuggets and we have the lake and so if I in the wintertime I'm out hunting for gold nuggets in the summertime when it's too hot to be out in the desert I'm down at the lake looking for jewelry and money and anything people have lost nugget hunting is my favorite aspect of metal detecting because there's so much of it here when I lived in Northern California there was more history and I spent a lot of time digging up old silver coins but then I got bit by the Gold Bug when I first started finding gold was when White's came out with their first gold detectors the gold master too and I was fortunate to live close enough to the Sierra Nevada mountain range that I could go up there on the weekends and hunt for gold then once I started finding gold that was just real special [Music] we had a lot of rain this winter and it took these washes and moved a lot of dirt right down to the bedrock [Music] I'm getting a faint signal right here [Music] when you get a faint signal like that that tells me that it's either a tiny nugget or it's a larger object that's deep but since we're hunting right on top of bedrock it's probably something very small so I like to move the dirt a little bit at a time so I don't fling the nugget and then have to go and find it again and the more dirt I move and the closer I get the search coil to the Nugget the louder the signal gets and then I can pin it tell where it's coming from [Music] sometimes when they're that small and you're working in an awkward area it's kind of hard to tell exactly where the signals coming from I do this process of elimination a little bit at a time because sometimes the nuggets have so much dust on them that you can't really see them until you get down to just a little tiny bit okay there it is this is pretty typical of the stuff that we find up here well about the size of a grain of rice and smaller it's fun finding these little Pickers this area is loaded with them so I carry a little container with me and when I find one it goes in the container and then I'm off for the next one in Havasu we have a local prospecting club called the Havasu gold-seekers we have 8 square miles of claims and there's 350 families that belong to the club and it only takes an hour to get to the claims from here so if I'm going to go out and go prospecting for the day most likely I'll go to the claims because it's close my greatest frustration in this hobby is not having enough time because I own a retail store I'm in my store 6 days a week and I don't get to get out and hike for gold or down at the lake as much as I would like to there was a time in my life when I was in-between jobs for a year and a half and I went out with my detector every day and that's all I wanted to do and I found a lot of stuff I found lots of old coins and gold rings at the beach and gold nuggets I missed that I'd like to be able to do that again this is noisy ground there's a lot of black sand in here oh there it is it's another bullet this is a 50 caliber General Patton had maneuvers in this area they had land maneuvers on the other side of the Colorado River and air maneuvers on this side he had planes that towed huge targets and then the fighter planes would come and shoot the targets down so this area is littered with these we dig him up by the bucketful this is a quartz rock that has gold laced in it I found this in the Sierra mountain range climbing a rock pile where they were doing the hydraulic monitoring washing the mountain side away and I was walking around on the rock piles and found this rock and it just overloaded the signal on my metal detector I don't know how much gold is in it it's mostly clinging on the outer the outside of one side and penetrating through about a half an inch so it is connected I don't know how much gold is in it I don't care how much gold is in it it's just that was so much fun to find and this one I had cut into slabs and I have about 20 of these slabs and each one of these is laced with gold someday I'm going to have these cut made into cabochons and I'll make some jewelry out of them but this was probably my most impressive rock when we return sue Sully will show us her most special find and we'll also meet Jerry Markinson who has just been hunting for two years and had incredible luck finding gold nuggets and jewelry [Music] this is one of the my favorite things I found this is an old branding iron that goes back to the time period between the 1880s and the 1920s and the reason it means so much to me is I know who owned it and I know how it was used and I have pictures in a history book that tell me who owned it it belonged to a man named Franklin Gilbert and he had a lumber mill and teams of oxen and when he wasn't using the oxen to drag the big logs out of the forest he was turning them loose to forage for food and there were several lumber mills in the area and each lumber mill owner had their own brand and their own team of oxen and that's how it was used my husband and I met through this hobby we were both teaching classes independently so we started combining the classes we were teaching and so when people ask me what's the best thing I've ever found with my metal detector I have to say my husband I want to see people have as much fun as I do I want to see them be as successful at it as I am and I'm always helping people and answering their questions you can read an instruction manual and it will tell you what the knobs on the detector are for and why they work the way they do the people that take our class walk away with more confidence plus I have watched dozens of people dig their first nugget when I've been teaching these classes and it's like they get this huge grin on their face it's like watching your child walk for the first time there's a difference between what you do and who you are and this is who I am it's what I do but it's also Who I am like if someone says to you what do you do you think about your job but that's not really who you are but this is what I am Jerry got started only two years ago gold prospecting and treasure hunting on the shores of Lake Havasu in Arizona and now that the treasure bug has bitten her she's in it for life I got started in metal detecting when I moved out here to Arizona three years ago I actually came to this shop that I'm sitting in now venture West and talked to the owner sue about getting some maps and things for the area for finding rocks and minerals but then as I looked around and saw the metal detectors I started talking to the owner and people that were coming in and out of the store and it piqued my interest so I tried it out with borrowing somebody's metal detector a couple times and I liked it I have myself a metal detector and I'm not going to it I love it what intrigued me about metal detecting was the fact that I could find something that maybe been gone for a very long time that somebody lost maybe back in the 40s 50s even the 1800s I'd love to be able to find something that old I haven't yet but I'm still working on it or I could help somebody to find something that they've lost because that's always a good feeling helping somebody recover something that just today I was down at the beach and somebody lost a horseshoe and I helped him recover it that was pretty easy too but they had buried it and they were looking for a long time couldn't find it so I helped him find it just just going out there and finding things my particular metal detector I can hunt either gold or treasure which to me would be rings watches items other than gold nugget I use eBay to make a little profit if it's not something I can use for example the many pairs of sunglasses that I found since these kids are down here they have real fancy ones and some of them can go for as much as 75 80 dollars on eBay because there may be hundred and $50 sunglasses I found three gold nuggets small gold nuggets and they're on the gold claims here and have a sue there's a gold seekers group and the three that I have found were in that claim and this is my gold which you can't really see very well in the jar but I know it's there and I can hear it and I can see it and I'm hoping that that's going to get to be a lot more as I search for more and more here in Arizona we have some areas where meteorites have hit so if you're interested in meteorites and I love science fiction in the outer space I went to a place called gold basin where they wear meteorites have have fallen and I did find one and you get the same kind of a signal as if you find gold I found a gold chain 14 karat gold chain and I actually wear it occasionally too this was one of the items I found snorkeling which I thought was rather interesting it took me a little while to figure out what it was and I it's a sterling silver piece and I believe it's four a scarf or a bathing suit skirt and it's just a nice hunk of silver that I might actually even melt down and turn into a piece of jewelry since I take lapidary this is from Tiffany's which was probably the only item I'll ever own from Tiffany's but I did try and find the owner of this because there is a name on the other side and if you recognize this bracelet and I lost it and can tell me your the name on the other side you may get it back but I effect on this at about I was probably one about three or four inches down if that deep this was on after a after a busy holiday when we return Gerry will share why she's so lucky with her treasure hunting finds [Music] Lake Havasu City is a fairly young community in the 1800s gold miners hunted the hills and in 1930 Parker dam was built on this section of the Colorado River providing a beautiful area for recreation but it wasn't until 1971 that Robert McCulloch bought the London Bridge from the City of London the bridge was dismantled and shipped thousands of miles to the arid desert location along the Colorado River once the bridge was rebuilt it attracted tourists from around the country since then the area has become a very popular destination for boating and having fun in the Sun it's here that Jeri Markinson takes advantage of this tourism traffic to hunt treasure on weekends during the summer people come down in their boats they'll pull up especially on the three-day weekends they'll pull up a lot of the kids college kids will come up in daddy's boats the expensive boats and they're maybe wearing their expensive sunglasses and jewelry and they tend to those things like that and so I'll follow up the next day after they've all left or maybe sometimes in the evenings and try and find something that's some of those things and if it's not something that I returned to the people because I mean if it's a valuable item I'll check the local paper for a day or two and if not I might just put it up on eBay well here I am on beach of Lake Havasu City and it's a very busy Memorial Day weekend this is one of the busiest holidays of the year here and I'm getting a little bit of head start doing some metal detecting looking for things usually kids come down here with daddy's boat and they tend to lose a lot of things so doing my best to pick some of that up we got a little signal here nope still there sometimes I'm diggin and I'm picking up things from older older parties or it is just a penny after being in this hobby just a short time jerry has been very lucky in her finds my gold hunting and treasure hunting I've been pretty lucky in the two years that I've been doing it I've found three small nuggets on those claims that some people have been searching there for three four maybe five years as far as I know and they haven't found anything so that's called out luck I suppose finding down in by the beaches finding jewelry watches and things again maybe it's luck maybe I just put my metal detector in the right spot at the right time I am lucky at the casino sometimes since I moved out here I started going up to the casinos and within a six-month period I won two cars I don't think one has to do with the other I think it's just a matter of sticking to it the more you do it the more you're gonna find I say you live right and you get treated right so maybe that has something to do with it - even though jerry has found a lot over the last couple of years she still has big goals the ultimate find would be a large gold nugget or pack of old money old coins old gold coins something very old would be just any of those would be wonderful I think are we doing this for a very long time there is no reason at all for me to stop it's just it's it's a very inexpensive hobby once you have your metal detector or new equipment you can update it but it's I don't think it's necessary because I'm finding things with what I have so I plan on doing this as long as I can thank you for watching this edition of treasure hunting America join us next time for more stories of people looking for hidden treasure all over the country I'm your host mark Hendricks and until next time happy hunting treasure hunting America is sponsored by whites electronics manufacturers of the world's finest metal detectors for over 50 years white has been building metal detectors in the USA for treasure hunters around the world for more information visit their website or call the number on your screen [Music] [Music] you

Channel: CompelMedia

Views: 56,066

Rating: 4.8487396 out of 5

Keywords: THA, 106, rich, social, media, development, production, video, marketing, webisodes, case, studies, how-to, television, series, documentaries, tourism, commercial, trade, show, product, fundraising, factory, tour, facility, training, instructional, retail, treasure, hunting, america, tv

Id: a83ZQffX7p8

Length: 22min 30sec (1350 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 09 2011